Two students borrow to earn nursing degrees. The one who works at a public hospital can pay an “affordable” percentage of his income for 10 years, then erase the rest of the debt under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF). The other works as a nurse at a private hospital. That’s not considered public service, so the debt has to be repaid in full.

Emily Best, 32, works on a Pennsylvania farm for $1,600 a month plus room and board. She “has tens of thousands of dollars in loans, mostly from graduate school, where she studied environmental policy with a focus on farming and agriculture,” reports MarketWatch.

Under the income-based repayment open to all borrowers, she’s able to defer paying her loans without defaulting. But the debt won’t go away.

“Best thinks she deserves to have her loans forgiven” after 10 years like others who serve the public interest, writes Holt.

. . . Best certainly is performing a public service. And so is the truck driver delivering his food to the grocery store, and the grocery store clerk, selling me my food. So too is the parent without any paid job, taking care of a child at home. Children, after all, are the future. The question for Best, and the government, is who isn’t working in the service of the public?

Student debt is worse than you think, writes Kevin Carey. Schools may have low default rates but high non-repayment rates. Students can defer or delay making loan payments “based on economic hardship, continuing education and other factors.” The interest keeps mounting up.

. . . my parents had us children grow a garden and raise chickens. One year we even raised a steer in our backyard for a while. He was rather bad-tempered (I wonder if he understood our nickname for him, “Dinner”) . . .

With only 70 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, Walton School faced closure. People in the small Kansas town saw the school as “the only thing standing between their community and a future as a ghost town, writes Susan Headden. The district turned it into a K-4 charter school, the Walton Rural Life Center, with a hands-on curriculum linked to farming.

One of only two such elementary schools in the country, Walton, which now has 170 students (it pulls from outside the district), is considered an unqualified success. It scores in the top 5 percent on the state’s standardized achievement tests; it has been celebrated by the U.S. Department of Education; and educators come from across the country to learn its secrets. The school is so popular that its waiting list, now at 40, extends as far out as 2015. Some parents try to register their children while they are still in the womb.

Natise Vogt, the principal, says her school “is not out to produce the next generation of American farmers.”

Walton picked agriculture for three simple reasons: kids love it, Kansas is a farm state, and as it turns out, there is almost nothing in elementary education that can’t be explained by relating it to cows and plows.

Take eggs. If second-grade teacher Staci Schill were running a standard classroom, she would be drilling her students on double-digit addition with the help of a prescribed textbook. There is still some of this kind of instruction, but building lessons around the agricultural theme lets kids see how they use their math facts in daily life. In this case, the students sell eggs produced by a small coop of hens. Every morning they rush out to collect and wash the eggs, inspect them for cracks, and box them for sale for $2 a dozen. (They recently bought a sheep with the proceeds.) The students learn not just how to tell the difference between a Delaware Blue and a Rhode Island Red, but also about profit and loss and, when the chickens don’t lay enough to meet projections, supply and demand.

Walton kids take their rulers and protractors to everything from tractor tires to goat horns. They learn their ounces, cups, and pints by measuring grain for animal feed and oats for granola. Math and science come alive with trips to the grain elevator and a cruise inside a modern tractor, complete with GPS. The fourth-graders recently made a mockup of a wind turbine, learning about things like torque and the behavior of different blades.

Walton is attracting students with disabilities such as Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit disorder: 25 percent of students have special needs, nearly double the rate for the district.